The Great Art

The philosophy of this ancient discipline is mysterious1a, both necessarily and deliberately. Necessarily, because it took into account the invisible world which cannot be observed by the senses and therefore could not be described in a logical fashion. Deliberately because the knowledge, which the alchemists believed themselves to be able to obtain, would confer a degree of power which, in the hands of the uninitiated, would be disastrous to the world. Western alchemy offers us two concomitant themes: the transmutation of base metals into gold, which is regarded as the ultimate stage in a process of perfection, and a religious conception of the regeneration of the soul1. These two interpretations give rise to two dominate schools of thought. The one school, the materialists who regard alchemy as a chemical process at time covered allegorically in terms of religious experiences. The other mystical which conceives alchemy as a spiritual process disguised in the language of chemistry.